For years, news organizations have focused on growing audience reach through page views, circulation and scale. But according to a new global study conducted by FT Strategies in partnership with WAN-IFRA and supported by Arc XP, the future of newsroom success may depend less on producing more content and more on building stronger audience relationships.
The Future Newsrooms Study surveyed more than 400 newsroom leaders across 86 countries and found that audience engagement has become journalism’s top strategic priority. Yet many organizations continue to struggle with aligning that goal to daily newsroom operations. One finding stood out to Lamberto Lambertini, Insights Manager at FT Strategies and lead researcher on the project.
“The amount of time journalists are still putting into production was quite astonishing,” Lambertini said, noting that more than 30% of a journalist’s workweek is still devoted to content production. He questioned, “How much time does a journalist actually have to talk to their audience, to find stories?” Lambertini argued that news organizations must rethink how they allocate newsroom time if they hope to deepen audience relationships and strengthen journalism’s value.
The audience alignment challenge
For Stig Kirk Ørskov, CEO of WAN-IFRA, the findings reinforce a lesson many successful publishers have already learned.
“If you look at the most successful media companies this year, that’s the media companies with the best understanding of the audience,” Ørskov said. “That’s the media companies that really, really respect the raw data of audience behavior.” While audience-centric thinking has helped drive successful subscription businesses for years, Ørskov believes many newsrooms have been slow to evolve operationally.
“We haven’t seen newsroom behavior or newsroom organization changing and actually reflecting that knowledge,” he said. “That this is what really drives deep audience engagement and, in that way, also drives successful subscription models.” Both leaders pushed back against the notion that audience data somehow threatens editorial independence. “We have the data, so why should we not be transparent about it?” Ørskov asked. “Journalism is about getting people access to the truth. So let’s reveal the truth about our audience behavior.”
Lambertini agreed, arguing that strategic priorities should not be hidden from journalists. “The idea that we have to shield the newsroom from our strategic priorities because it might change their view about what stories they can do or not is a wrong approach,” he said.
Sharing data and building new roles
One of the study’s more striking findings was that only a small percentage of newsrooms have developed specialized roles focused on connecting strategy, audience engagement and editorial execution.
Lambertini pointed to emerging positions such as audience engagement leaders and newsroom engineers as examples of how organizations can bridge gaps between newsroom priorities and business goals. “These roles are still massively underdeveloped,” he said. “Our survey finds that only 10% of respondents have these types of roles in their organizations.”
Ørskov believes newsroom leaders should start with a simple step: making audience insights visible. “I have not met a single journalist who is not deeply interested in how his or her stories engage audiences,” he said. “My first advice, my second advice and my third advice is: share the data, talk about the data and qualify the data as well.”
Importantly, he emphasized that meaningful audience understanding extends beyond page-view metrics. “It’s not about page views. It’s about how long people stay with an article, how much they share it, how much they comment on it.”
AI’s biggest challenge isn’t technology
The study also explored how artificial intelligence is reshaping newsroom workflows. According to Lambertini, many organizations have already moved beyond basic experimentation. “Newsrooms are quite advanced in terms of automation and thinking about ways they can speed up simple tasks and free up time,” he said.
The next phase, however, involves applying AI to reporting itself. “The most forward-thinking organizations are thinking about how AI applies to news gathering,” Lambertini said, describing efforts to use AI tools to monitor information sources, identify emerging trends and uncover story opportunities.
Perhaps most surprising was the finding that newsroom adoption is being slowed less by technology and more by organizational resistance. “It’s reassuring that the biggest barriers are not technical,” Lambertini said. “Many journalists already have impressive skills in building agents or experimenting with AI applications.”
The future journalist
When asked what skills future journalists will need, both speakers emphasized that core human abilities remain central. “The ability to be curious, the ability to collaborate, the ability to work effectively with leadership,” Lambertini said. “Those might sound like soft skills, but they are not going away.”
He also highlighted growing demand for computational journalism, OSINT reporting and the ability to communicate across multiple platforms. “The ability to appear on video, to be clipped from a podcast, to stand out in audio and video formats — those are increasingly valuable skills.”
Ørskov offered perhaps the interview’s most provocative observation. Quoting a leading Finnish editor, he noted that “she doesn’t consider writing to be a core skill for journalists going forward.” Rather than focusing solely on writing, he argued that journalists should concentrate on the things AI cannot easily replicate. “You can meet people, talk to them, observe them. You can get out of the newsroom and do original reporting.”
Ultimately, Ørskov remains optimistic about journalism’s future. “I think AI might actually make the value of real human-made journalism even greater,” he said. “And I think we may actually gain more clarity about where we create value in our connection with audiences.”
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